[Previous post: part 3]

After arriving in Mürren, we walked around the town before heading out on the “Northface trail,” an easy loop hike that was supposed to take about 2.5 hours. Earth Trekkers recommended the clockwise direction and closing the loop with a ride on the Allmendhubel funicular to avoid a final steep decent.

Mürren is a cute, but touristy, town with good views of the mountains everywhere. (The umlaut on the u in Mürren made searching for it on the transit app with my US keyboard difficult until I cut and pasted the word from a website and then had it in my list of recent searches.)

The Northface trail starts off on a dirt road, but most of the hike is on narrow dirt paths through farms. At the beginning we could look back and get a nice view of the town of Mürren, but quickly we were surrounded by gorgeous views of mountains with a few short treks through wooded areas and some encounters with cows. The cows are fenced in with electric fences, which visitors are warned not to touch. From time to time we had to open and close a gate to stay on the trail.

After about 2.5 hours of hiking the road to the Allmendhubel funicular was in sight and we were ready for our ride down the mountain. We hiked to the funicular and were disappointed to discover it had already closed for the day. At that point we had no choice but to turn around and retrace our steps back to the trail and continue on down the hill. Ideally, the last leg would be done with hiking polls, but we managed without them. When we reached the bottom we could see the funicular track on the hill. We walked to the train station and took a cog train to a cable car back to Lauterbrunnen.

Next up: Part 5: 5 trains to Glion